Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 355 posts

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#341

Post by joe_mamba »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #70
alephnerd wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think Europe should invest into manufacturing RAM ... This would be an opportunity to create domestic supply of it How? Most foundries across Asia and the US are being given subsidizes that outstrip those that the EU is providing, with the only mega-foundry project in Europe was canceled by Intel last year [0]. Additionally, much of the backend work like OSAT and packaging is done in ASEAN (especially Malaysia),…

Why are you overlooking European semiconductor champions? STMicroelectronics, Infineon Technologies, and NXP Semiconductors. All of them are skilled enough to build and operate a DRAM fab in Europe. A bunch of EU dev banks can lend the monies to get it built.

>Why are you overlooking European semiconductor champions?

Champions at what? They pale in comparison to the likes of Samsung and TSM at IP and manufacturing.

> A bunch of EU dev banks can lend the monies to get it built.

Why would EU banks risk their money on a DRAM fab meant to compete with Asia that has lower wages, lower regulations, less environmentalism, etc?

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#342

Post by KellyCriterion »

bradlys wrote: post #314
toast0 wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Big corporations tend to send old hardware through the surplus marketplace. There's lots of 3-4 year old corporate computers for sale. Often, the company leases the computers and then the lessor will sell them when they're returned.

Meanwhile I’m at faang and they’re reusing 7 year old monitors still. Still getting equipment from pre-covid era. Where are these luxurious big corporations that give their employees nice new equipment? :(

What Im doing wrong? My 24" with 1920x1200 from 2010 is doing quite fine until today?

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#343

Post by egorfine »

noosphr wrote: post #322
egorfine wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not fair. Anybody could've done that. Now try to really sincerely use copilot prompt in the Run dialog.

I'm on Linux.

Ah so you want things done the easy way? That's not fair. Everybody could have been running Linux and avoiding Microslop whatsoever.

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#344

Post by nirui »

hinkley wrote: post #328
nirui wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this market, CXMT is more likely to also move to HBM production rather than consumer grade RAMs. After all China is also doing an AI push in a competition with the US, and the domestic Chinese companies are "recommended/guided" by the government to help, while consumers are pushed to lower priorities. The situation I'm worrying about is that these PC manufacturers could use this opportunity to push for a more lock…

Does that mean we should be designing HBM into consumer devices?

I wouldn't say "should be", but HBM could indeed benefit the end-user somewhat, like @15155 already pointed out. And that benefit could be used as justification for soldered HBMs on future computers.

BUT... a smart consumer would also recognize the other side of the story: do we really need HBM on consumer devices? We don't serve 1000 users at the same time, a slower, cheaper device is good enough for most use cases (including the professional ones), better if it's also somewhat future-proof. After all, smart people usually have better foresight.

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#345

Post by nirui »

15155 wrote: post #290
nirui wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this market, CXMT is more likely to also move to HBM production rather than consumer grade RAMs. After all China is also doing an AI push in a competition with the US, and the domestic Chinese companies are "recommended/guided" by the government to help, while consumers are pushed to lower priorities. The situation I'm worrying about is that these PC manufacturers could use this opportunity to push for a more lock…

Soldered RAM has objectively lower latency and better signal integrity. Connectors aren't free, in terms of link/SI budget. This isn't some conspiracy, it's electrical reality.

Problem is, the gain in performance to an user maybe negligible compare to the pain that the device purchased might never be able to be fitted to run some application.

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#346

Post by lucianbr »

joe_mamba wrote: post #298
lucianbr wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we mostly agree. Just "no RAM factories because we have more competitive advantage elswhere" is different than "no RAM factories because they are not guaranteed a profit". Are pharma and weapons really guaranteed? Less risk because we are better positioned is something else, and actually makes sense.

>I think we mostly agree. Just "no RAM factories because we have more competitive advantage elswhere" is different than "no RAM factories because they are not guaranteed a profit". But then people shouldn't moan that the EU is absent from the RAM manufacturing industry or pretend like it's something easy they could do on a whim if the EU suddenly wanted to. >Are pharma and weapons really guaranteed? There will always…

> There will always be sick people and people killing each other.

Any given drug or weapon can still fail or not make a profit. As well it could be said that computers will still need memory for the foreseeable future. You're not keeping a coherent position in this discussion, just replying with cool soundbites.

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#347

Post by naveen99 »

crakenzak wrote: post #155
lou1306 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't explicitly allocate cache, but you can lay things out in memory to minimize cache misses.

Out of curiosity, why has there not been a slight paradigm shift in modern system programming languages to expose more control over the caches?

I would say this is the main benefit of cuda programming on gpu. You get to control local memory. Maybe nvidia will bring it to the cpu now that the make CPU’s

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#348

Post by zuhsetaqi »

christophilus wrote: post #257
dahcryn wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've actively started to use outlook and teams through chrome to free up some of my ram, easily saves 3-4gb. It's gotten ridiculous how much ram basic tools are using, leaving nothing for doing actually real work

People get on me all the time about not installing programs on my computer. I run everything in the browser, if I can. Partly so I can kill it properly without it misbehaving, and partly because I don't trust their software at all. Zoom, Slack, Gmail, etc-- if I can run it in the browser, then that's the only way I'll run it.

Same for me on mobile. I don’t install the Amazon app I just use the browser where I can limit tracking and only log in when actually buying something.

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#349

Post by debugnik »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #312
debugnik wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not building any new manufacturing capacity though. They assume this is a demand bubble and they don't want supply to exceed demand after it pops.

multiple major DRAM factories are currently being built or planned, driven by AI demand and government incentives. Micron is constructing a massive $100 billion "megafab" complex in New York, with groundbreaking occurring in January 2026, and is building new facilities in Idaho. Other projects include expansion in Singapore and Japan. Key DRAM Factory Construction Projects: Micron Technology (USA): Building a $100 bi…

A quick search tells me the megafab in New York was announced years ago, the Singapore fab is for NAND flash, and the Taiwan fab already exists and they're buying it. So none of those are in response to the AI demand for RAM, are they?

Re: RAM now represents 35 percent of bill of materials for HP PCs

#350

Post by nektro »

dijit wrote: post #39
Gigachad wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worry is that these high prices aren't going to last long. And by the time you spend years building the capacity, the prices plummet making your facility uneconomical to run. Ram will always be in some demand, but that doesn't mean it's viable for everyone to start building production.

There's a few things to note here: 1) Prices aren't returning to "normal". The only way they will is if the hyperscalers and AI companies start to implode -- which will kill a huge portion of the US economy and lead to global recession, so, cheap RAM but nobody can afford it 2) By building up capacity you influence the outcome. If someone else enters the DRAM space, the duopoly has to actually start thinking about co…

> The only way they will is if the [..] AI companies start to implode

this is the theory of those who are expecting the ram shortage to be short, yes

Post reply on HN